And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  Peninit hurried to the kitchen cabinets and examined the marble countertop. “Do you have those reusable paper towels? There’s nothing better for these little accidents,” she announced, opening and shutting doors. “Reusable?” Nadia sounded incredulous. “You mean, like, a paper towel you can reuse?” She gazed hypnotically at the woman (“She’s not my daughter-in-law, or my mother-in-law, that’s what she is for Margie . . . But what’s the name for what she is to me? I can’t remember . . . ”) with the tower of red hair that now tilted to one side, and the flattened, bejeweled fingers, who was bustling around her kitchen, doing things, saying things, overturning, arranging, detaching, rattling the hanging pots, the long ladle and forks, all with intolerable alertness, an energy and vitality that were out of place and which were an affront, in Nadia’s opinion, not only to good taste but to morality itself. A wave of aversion, if not actual hatred, passed through Nadia toward her (“Peninit, Peninit,” she remembered, “her name is Peninit!”) and every movement she made in the kitchen, exuding her dense vapors of scent (“It’s her perfume that makes me nauseous,” Nadia remembered), every gesture or tone of voice aroused in Nadia a sharp pain and distress, just like a pair of crude, clumsy hands touching a sick, fragile body lying helplessly in bed. This glacier of loathing swelled and expanded inside her until her throat closed up and she was overcome with shortness of breath (she coughed, trying to alleviate it), provoking terrible fear for her own well-being (“I’m having some kind of heart attack”) and of herself (“I could right this minute strangle her with my own two hands, right this minute”). She dug her fingernails deep into her thighs, near her buttocks, trying ostensibly to halt the surging of that glacier, which was now turning into a careening truck threatening to run over and annihilate her and her home (“The home,” she remembered with dread: “The home.”). She strained her eyes, tried as hard as she could to push away the violent fog and focus on the tall woman (“Peninit, Peninit”), her eyes latching on to Peninit’s long earrings with their diamond teardrops that dangled down to her neck, acquiescing to the pleas that finally started cohering inside her (“She could destroy me, that woman. She could destroy the lot of us after all the money she put down at that catering hall. Where are we going to come up with that money if she asks? And she will. She wasn’t born yesterday, she’ll ask, and where’ll we come up with it?”), joining together and slowly rising into a voice, weak at first but then firm.

  Nadia found herself walking over to Peninit and putting her clammy hand on her cheek. “You look so beautiful, it’s stunning the way you look with your hair up,” she said, flustered by herself and by all the tribulations of the invisible path she’d been down these last three minutes. To her surprise, she was completely present in the words she said, and she looked with absolutely genuine marvel, almost admiration, at Peninit’s plump, reddish mountain of hair (her own hair had thinned and shed in the past few years, and she tried to reinvigorate it with expensive products and disguise its sparseness with devious hairstyles), underneath which lay her glorious, white forehead. Peninit hugged her, pressed her to her chest, still holding two wet rags (the metal zipper on her tracksuit poked Nadia’s eye, since she was far shorter than Peninit). “There, there. It’ll be okay. You’ll see it’ll be fine, open up your heart and it’ll be fine,” Peninit said and walked Nadia back to the dining table, sat her down and sat down next to her. Nadia covered her face with her hands, then suddenly leaned over and put her lips on the back of Peninit’s hand. “God bless. I wish only good things for your kind heart,” she said.

  Ilan looked at the two of them from his post near the cabinet (searching for the cookies Nadia had hidden, mostly from herself, because of the diet). “Fantastic. Maybe you can just marry each other? That’ll definitely be a lot more joyful,” he said on his way to the living room and bumped into Matti, who was just coming in.

  The three of them gave Matti a questioning look. “She’s not,” he said curtly and poured himself some Coke. “Not what? What’s happening?” his mother asked impatiently. “Not talking,” he replied, “doesn’t want to talk.” Arieh and Peninit exchanged an expressionless look, as though handing each other a package whose destination or origin could not be located. “Well,” said Arieh finally, “not to worry. So she won’t talk. She doesn’t have to. The bride does not have to talk, as far as I recall.” Matti looked up at the ceiling and shut his eyes for a second. “It’s not that, Dad. Never mind. She doesn’t want to get married.” “Who doesn’t?” Peninit asked distractedly, turning red down to her auburn roots. “Who?! Margie. That’s who. Who else could not want to get married?” Matti blurted. Arieh put his hand to his hat and ponderously ran his finger over the sharp edge of the visor: “Some people don’t want to get married. Why not? It’s possible. I didn’t want to get married, I think,” he said in a dreamy voice.

  Peninit gave him a bewildered look, opened her mouth as if to say something, but Nadia beat her to it, jumped up, smoothed down her yellow quiff and then the front of her dress, brushing off imaginary crumbs. “Margie’s good, she’s a good girl, Margie. She has the best heart, the best, I’m telling you.” She scanned the others, lingering on Peninit. “She just doesn’t feel well, that’s all. She doesn’t feel well, poor girl.” She fell back into her seat and jumbled the perfect structure of matchsticks that Peninit had arranged on the table.

  There was a silence. Peninit began, clearing her throat first. “No one’s saying anything bad about Margie, why would we say anything bad about Margie? She’s a gem of a girl. Everyone here,” she stopped for a moment, darkened her brows at Matti and then went on, “everyone here loves her very much. Very much. It’s just that we have to . . . ” She stopped again, digging through her purse for the phone that had started ringing, and disappeared with it into the living room.

  Matti looked at his father, who sat opposite him, rummaging in the plastic bags in search of his blood pressure monitor, which he carried everywhere, contradicting the explicit orders issued by his doctor, who had warned that frequent measurements of blood pressure could make his condition worse. “Where is it?” Arieh mumbled to himself, emptying the bags onto the floor, “where could I have put it?” He wandered around the table, stepping carefully among little mounds of folded fabric and wrapped boxes. His hooked nose, which pointed forward like a final act of impudence within the compliant field of his face, and mostly his thin, protruding lower lip, aroused in Matti (who watched from the side) a feeling of sorrow and heartache for this man who was apparently his father, and whose life had passed him by while he constantly backed up against walls. Now, too, there seemed to be a wall in whose shadow he could shelter. (Which one? Mattie wondered. Which wall? He piled up the matches scattered across the table and put them back, one by one, into their box.)

  “That was the photographer,” Peninit said, back from the living room, as she distastefully surveyed the mess of emptied-out bags on the floor. “She couldn’t get hold of you. She said you arranged to meet at five for the pictures, in that park where the foreign workers hang out, by the Central Bus Station, didn’t you?”

  Matti nodded, turning the matchbox over from side to side.

  “Have you by any chance seen my blood pressure . . . ?” Arieh asked her. “I’ve turned everything out and I can’t find it. Maybe it’s in your purse?”

  Peninit did not respond. She glared at Matti. “What’s the story with that Levinsky Park with all those Sudanese? You wanted your wedding pictures with the Sudanese?” she asked.

  “What Sudanese?” Nadia was having trouble following. “Who’s taking pictures of the Sudanese?”

  “Not of them,” Peninit clarified, “with them, in that park they go to. For the wedding. With all those Sudanese foreign workers they brought over here, him and Margie wanted to do their wedding pictures, can you believe it?” She went over to her large bag, took out the blood pressure monitor, and threw it in Arieh’s lap.

  “I think it’s a very nice idea to get their
pictures there. It’s very picturesque with all those blacks in their white clothes, and Margie with the white dress. Very unique,” Arieh said, tightening the cuff on his arm, his lips slightly open and stretching into a faint smile, like a baby finally given his bottle.

  “How much did you pay them?” Nadia asked suspiciously. “How much did they ask?”

  “Who asked, asked what, what are you talking about?” Matti murmured.

  Nadia didn’t hear him. “How many of them did you pay—five? Even if each one didn’t take a lot, that’s still something altogether. I’m sure they wouldn’t do the pictures out of the kindness of their heart,” she said, searching for something. “I really need a cigarette.”

  Matti put his hands on his stomach, which had started grumbling again. “Listen,” he began, then stopped, facing the same dead end again, the same locked and embarrassing door from an hour ago, which had become the dead end inside him, except that now it was adorned with these faces in front of him, which perked up and jumped out and gaped with eyes and mouths like crazy glove puppets, with the crowing and prattling of his mother and father and mother-in-law (“my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law,” he kept rolling the words off his tongue), all of them together and each one separately. All that prattling had nothing to do with what was really true, really honest and private, and which resulted entirely from what there had been and what there still was between him and Margie, between Margie and him, which still existed and was still present, despite the locked door and perhaps even more forcefully because of the locked door, behind which Margie had barricaded herself and which oddly magnified what they shared between them, accentuated what glued them to each other, which had virtually no words, not words that he knew, only what she’d said, Margie, once, about six months ago, when they’d decided to get married, mostly because of Nadia and her suffering, and that night, as they sat in the dark car parked outside her house, Margie had said, “It’s an endangered species, all of this.” And he’d held her slender, frail fingers between his hands and asked, “Who’s endangered?” And Margie had smiled, looking at the dark bushes in front of them, or at something else, and she’d said, “Us. You and me.”

  “Listen,” Matti roused himself and began again, “don’t interfere. Please get your arms and legs out of our business.”

  “The boy is right,” Arieh concurred, writing down in his little notebook the latest blood pressure reading. “They’re fighting, him and Margie, or not fighting, it’s none of our business.”

  “What do you mean, right? How can you say he’s right?” Peninit fumed. She turned to Matti, practically pinning her face onto his (“Her face like that, up close, it must be like what Picasso saw when he painted those strange, dismantled faces,” he thought). “What do you mean, none of our business? What? I want to understand. Five hundred people are going to be in that wedding hall in a few hours and there’s no bride and no nothing, and it’s none of our business? Then what is our business? It’s like if we were all sailing along in one boat and you suddenly took a drill out and started drilling a hole in the boat, and then told me it’s none of my business! It’s just like that,” Peninit huffed, rattled by the rhetorical effort. She sat back down in her chair, took a sip from the glass in front of her, and grimaced: “Disgusting. This Coke has gone completely flat.”

  Ilan came closer and rapped his finger on the table three times. “Hear ye, hear ye!” he exclaimed, imitating some imaginary crier, his eyes aglimmer with a mocking spark. “She moved the vanity and blocked the door.”

  “Who?” Nadia asked in a panic.

  “Margie. That’s what she’s done. I walked by the room and heard someone dragging something. I’m sure that’s what she was doing. She blocked off the door with the vanity,” he said.

  “But there were things on it. Bottles, lots of things on it. And the picture of Natalie,” Nadia said, turning pale.

  “Maybe she moved the things off first. She might have done that,” Ilan reassured her, alarmed at the impression his news had made.

  “I’m not buying that,” Matti said, standing up. He went over to the sink and drank straight from the tap (“Why would you do that? There’s cold water in the fridge!” Nadia called out), then added, “Not buying it. She locked the door, what does she need to move furniture for?”

  They pondered his observation for a long time, looking down at the table, each wondering separately and all of them together (over their heads the low dining room lamp dispersed a pale yellow light that moved in slow circles, so slow that it was hard to perceive its motion with the naked eye, and then settled in above them in the form of a shining dish that brought to mind a cloud of dust or a halo) what the meaning of this escalation in the other room was, and whether it had any meaning at all, and whether there really had been an escalation in this paralysis that the bride had imposed upon herself and them. Still, they could not deny the sense that this latest news, however they were to comprehend and interpret it, represented a “step up in the situation,” as Arieh finally put it.

  “Well,” was what he said, unwittingly imitating Ilan by rapping on the table with his fingers, “whether she moved the vanity or didn’t move the vanity, it’s a step up in the situation, as they say.” Then he cleared his throat and added, “We need to call a locksmith to break open the door. That’s my opinion.”

  Peninit gave him a grateful look, stopped herself from expressing her relief too openly, so as not to aggravate the others, and asked fawningly, “Was it all right, your blood pressure reading, Arik’leh?”

  Nadia sat silently tugging at the lace sleeve of her dress. Then she seemed to become a little muddled, and said, “We’ll wait a bit with the locksmith. Let’s wait a bit more, we don’t have to get hysterical.”

  Peninit exclaimed, “Nadia! Nadia! Listen to me. It’s not hysterics, this is a truly difficult situation. For all of us. Think about what’s happening to Margie, think about her locked up in that room, how she might feel, think of that.”

  “No one’s calling any locksmith to break down any doors,” Matti said, his voice extinguished almost to a whisper, so that his parents had to lean over the table to hear him.

  “What?” Arieh whispered. “What did he say?”

  Peninit’s face was rigid. She reached out for the phone, biting her lower lip. “I’m calling the locksmith now, so he can finally open up the door and we’ll see what’s going on with that bride.”

  “No,” Matti said, “you’re not. Everything’s always by force with you, always force. You’re not going to force Margie out, let me make that clear. I respect” (he stomped his foot a little when he said that word, and his nostrils quivered) “her behavior even though I don’t understand it. That is what you are incapable of understanding. That I respect” (he raised his voice) “without understanding.”

  Peninit threw her head back and emitted a peculiar giggle that sounded like a whimper. “Respect! Understand! Don’t understand! How about a little respect and understanding for those who have to suffer and pay the price for your bride deciding at the last minute that she doesn’t love you and doesn’t want to marry you? How about that, maybe?”

  No one moved. Roped inside the circle of their breaths, they looked neither at one another nor at themselves, as though they’d been emptied out like a soft egg from its shell, and left hollow. Even the woman who had said those words and hurled that thing into the middle of the room and now stared, like all the others, at the thing she had hurled, which was much too big for her and for everyone else at that moment, and so forbidden that it seemed to go beyond the personal responsibility of any one person and was perceived as a deed committed by an invisible force that had opened up and shattered the ceiling above their heads and cast into the room the giant carcass of an unidentified animal encrusted with blood.

  As if in a dream, Nadia began collecting the glasses from the table (avoiding the carcass, she walked around it), holding two in each hand so that the glass clanged (it was mostly she who he
ard the clanging), placed them in the sink and looked around, wondering, trying to remember what she was supposed to do now, while that drum deep inside her head (“Pay, pay”) kept beating (“She said ‘Pay,’ Peninit did.”), continued to rhythmically accompany her every thought, feeling and act (“something about the ones who have to pay”) and she felt it might go on beating forever. Like a marionette with its strings cut off by the puppeteer, Nadia was thrown, or rather hurled, from mother to son and back, one moment casting a pleading look at Peninit and begging, “Family, we’re family,” and the next moment grasping Matti’s elbow (his sleeve was wet from the water he’d drunk at the sink) and insisting over and over again, “She loves you, Margie does. Of course she loves you, she does.”

  Peninit held her arms straight out and walked toward Matti as if she had suddenly gone blind (she really was half-blind, because of her heavy, damp eyelids) and hugged his waist, trying to encompass his rigid body, putting her cheek up against his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, not this way, really not, I didn’t want it this way,” she practically sobbed into her son’s shirt (he felt her warm, damp breath on his skin, through the fabric, and swore he would not move until it passed—just let it pass), then was suddenly overcome by a sneezing fit that lasted several minutes. She wiped her eyes and runny nose and explained dismissively, “It’s my allergies again.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Matti said, extricating himself with virtuosic tenderness from his mother’s embrace (an intricate act of loosening her fingers on his waist, one after the other, and taking tiny steps backward and sideways, toward the window), exited the kitchen, walked through the living room (Gramsy and Ilan had fallen asleep next to each other on the cognac-colored couch in front of the blaring television, she sitting with her mouth open, head drooped to one side, he curled up with his head on her lap on the imitation leather) on his way to the hallway that led to the bedroom.